An Essay on Comedy

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AN ESSAY ON COMEDY AND THE USES OF THE COMIC SPIRIT
by George Meredith


_This Essay was first published in 'The New Quarterly Magazine' for April
1877_.




ON THE IDEA OF COMEDY AND OF THE USES OF THE COMIC SPIRIT {1}


Good Comedies are such rare productions, that notwithstanding the wealth
of our literature in the Comic element, it would not occupy us long to
run over the English list. If they are brought to the test I shall
propose, very reputable Comedies will be found unworthy of their station,
like the ladies of Arthur's Court when they were reduced to the ordeal of
the mantle.

There are plain reasons why the Comic poet is not a frequent apparition;
and why the great Comic poet remains without a fellow. A society of
cultivated men and women is required, wherein ideas are current and the
perceptions quick, that he may be supplied with matter and an audience.
The semi-barbarism of merely giddy communities, and feverish emotional
periods, repel him; and also a state of marked social inequality of the
sexes; nor can he whose business is to address the mind be understood
where there is not a moderate degree of intellectual activity.

Moreover, to touch and kindle the mind through laughter, demands more
than sprightliness, a most subtle delicacy. That must be a natal gift in
the Comic poet. The substance he deals with will show him a startling
exhibition of the dyer's hand, if he is without it. People are ready to
surrender themselves to witty thumps on the back, breast, and sides; all
except the head: and it is there that he aims. He must be subtle to
penetrate. A corresponding acuteness must exist to welcome him. The
necessity for the two conditions will explain how it is that we count him
during centuries in the singular number.

'C'est une etrange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honnetes gens,'
Moliere says; and the difficulty of the undertaking cannot be
over-estimated.

Then again, he is beset with foes to right and left, of a character
unknown to the tragic and the lyric poet, or even to philosophers.

We have in this world men whom Rabelais would call agelasts; that is to
say, non-laughers; men who are in that respect as dead bodies, which if
you prick them do not bleed. The old grey boulder-stone that has
finished its peregrination from the rock to the valley, is as easily to
be set rolling up again as these men laughing. No collision of
circumstances in our mortal career strikes a light for them. It is but
one step from being agelastic to misogelastic, and the [Greek text], the
laughter-hating, soon learns to dignify his dislike as an objection in
morality.

We have another class of men, who are pleased to consider themselves
antagonists of the foregoing, and whom we may term hypergelasts; the
excessive laughers, ever-laughing, who are as clappers of a bell, that
may be rung by a breeze, a grimace; who are so loosely put together that
a wink will shake them.

'. . . C'est n'estimer rien qu'estioner tout le monde,'

and to laugh at everything is to have no appreciation of the Comic of
Comedy.

Neither of these distinct divisions of non-laughers and over-laughers
would be entertained by reading The Rape of the Lock, or seeing a
performance of Le Tartuffe. In relation to the stage, they have taken in
our land the form and title of Puritan and Bacchanalian. For though the
stage is no longer a public offender, and Shakespeare has been revived on
it, to give it nobility, we have not yet entirely raised it above the
contention of these two parties. Our speaking on the theme of Comedy
will appear almost a libertine proceeding to one, while the other will
think that the speaking of it seriously brings us into violent contrast
with the subject.

Comedy, we have to admit, was never one of the most honoured of the
Muses. She was in her origin, short of slaughter, the loudest expression
of the little civilization of men. The light of Athene over the head of
Achilles illuminates the birth of Greek Tragedy. But Comedy rolled in
shouting under the divine protection of the Son of the Wine-jar, as
Dionysus is made to proclaim himself by Aristophanes. Our second Charles
was the patron, of like benignity, of our Comedy of Manners, which began
similarly as a combative performance, under a licence to deride and
outrage the Puritan, and was here and there Bacchanalian beyond the
Aristophanic example: worse, inasmuch as a cynical licentiousness is more
abominable than frank filth. An eminent Frenchman judges from the
quality of some of the stuff dredged up for the laughter of men and women
who sat through an Athenian Comic play, that they could have had small
delicacy in other affairs when they had so little in their choice of
entertainment. Perhaps he does not make sufficient allowance for the
regulated licence of plain speaking proper to the festival of the god,
and claimed by the Comic poet as his inalienable right, or for the fact
that it was a festival in a season of licence, in a city accustomed to
give ear to the boldest utterance of both sides of a case. However that
may be, there can be no question that the men and women who sat through
the acting of Wycherley's Country Wife were past blushing. Our tenacity
of national impressions has caused the word theatre since then to prod
the Puritan nervous system like a satanic instrument; just as one has
known Anti-Papists, for whom Smithfield was redolent of a sinister smoke,
as though they had a later recollection of the place than the lowing
herds. Hereditary Puritanism, regarding the stage, is met, to this day,
in many families quite undistinguished by arrogant piety. It has
subsided altogether as a power in the profession of morality; but it is
an error to suppose it extinct, and unjust also to forget that it had
once good reason to hate, shun, and rebuke our public shows.

We shall find ourselves about where the Comic spirit would place us, if
we stand at middle distance between the inveterate opponents and the drum-
and-fife supporters of Comedy: 'Comme un point fixe fait remarquer
l'emportement des autres,' as Pascal says. And were there more in this
position, Comic genius would flourish.

Our English idea of a Comedy of Manners might be imaged in the person of
a blowsy country girl--say Hoyden, the daughter of Sir Tunbelly Clumsy,
who, when at home, 'never disobeyed her father except in the eating of
green gooseberries'--transforming to a varnished City madam; with a loud
laugh and a mincing step; the crazy ancestress of an accountably fallen
descendant. She bustles prodigiously and is punctually smart in her
speech, always in a fluster to escape from Dulness, as they say the dogs
on the Nile-banks drink at the river running to avoid the crocodile. If
the monster catches her, as at times he does, she whips him to a froth,
so that those who know Dulness only as a thing of ponderousness, shall
fail to recognise him in that light and airy shape.

When she has frolicked through her five Acts to surprise you with the
information that Mr. Aimwell is converted by a sudden death in the world
outside the scenes into Lord Aimwell, and can marry the lady in the light
of day, it is to the credit of her vivacious nature that she does not
anticipate your calling her Farce. Five is dignity with a trailing robe;
whereas one, two, or three Acts would be short skirts, and degrading.
Advice has been given to householders, that they should follow up the
shot at a burglar in the dark by hurling the pistol after it, so that if
the bullet misses, the weapon may strike and assure the rascal he has it.
The point of her wit is in this fashion supplemented by the rattle of her
tongue, and effectively, according to the testimony of her admirers. Her
wit is at once, like steam in an engine, the motive force and the warning
whistle of her headlong course; and it vanishes like the track of steam
when she has reached her terminus, never troubling the brains afterwards;
a merit that it shares with good wine, to the joy of the Bacchanalians.
As to this wit, it is warlike. In the neatest hands it is like the sword
of the cavalier in the Mall, quick to flash out upon slight provocation,
and for a similar office--to wound. Commonly its attitude is entirely
pugilistic; two blunt fists rallying and countering. When harmless, as
when the word 'fool' occurs, or allusions to the state of husband, it has
the sound of the smack of harlequin's wand upon clown, and is to the same
extent exhilarating. Believe that idle empty laughter is the most
desirable of recreations, and significant Comedy will seem pale and
shallow in comparison. Our popular idea would be hit by the sculptured
group of Laughter holding both his sides, while Comedy pummels, by way of
tickling him. As to a meaning, she holds that it does not conduce to
making merry: you might as well carry cannon on a racing-yacht. Morality
is a duenna to be circumvented. This was the view of English Comedy of a
sagacious essayist, who said that the end of a Comedy would often be the
commencement of a Tragedy, were the curtain to rise again on the
performers. In those old days female modesty was protected by a fan,
behind which, and it was of a convenient semicircular breadth, the ladies
present in the theatre retired at a signal of decorum, to peep, covertly
askant, or with the option of so peeping, through a prettily fringed
eyelet-hole in the eclipsing arch.

'Ego limis specto sic per flabellum clanculum.'--

TERENCE.

That fan is the flag and symbol of the society giving us our so-called
Comedy of Manners, or Comedy of the manners of South-sea Islanders under
city veneer; and as to Comic idea, vacuous as the mask without the face
behind it.

Elia, whose humour delighted in floating a galleon paradox and wafting it
as far as it would go, bewails the extinction of our artificial Comedy,
like a poet sighing over the vanished splendour of Cleopatra's
Nile-barge; and the sedateness of his plea for a cause condemned even in
his time to the penitentiary, is a novel effect of the ludicrous. When
the realism of those 'fictitious half-believed personages,' as he calls
them, had ceased to strike, they were objectionable company, uncaressable
as puppets. Their artifices are staringly naked, and have now the effect
of a painted face viewed, after warm hours of dancing, in the morning
light. How could the Lurewells and the Plyants ever have been praised
for ingenuity in wickedness? Critics, apparently sober, and of high
reputation, held up their shallow knaveries for the world to admire.
These Lurewells, Plyants, Pinchwifes, Fondlewifes, Miss Prue, Peggy,
Hoyden, all of them save charming Milamant, are dead as last year's
clothes in a fashionable fine lady's wardrobe, and it must be an
exceptionably abandoned Abigail of our period that would look on them
with the wish to appear in their likeness. Whether the puppet show of
Punch and Judy inspires our street-urchins to have instant recourse to
their fists in a dispute, after the fashion of every one of the actors in
that public entertainment who gets possession of the cudgel, is open to
question: it has been hinted; and angry moralists have traced the
national taste for tales of crime to the smell of blood in our nursery-
songs. It will at any rate hardly be questioned that it is unwholesome
for men and women to see themselves as they are, if they are no better
than they should be: and they will not, when they have improved in
manners, care much to see themselves as they once were. That comes of
realism in the Comic art; and it is not public caprice, but the
consequence of a bettering state. {2} The same of an immoral may be said
of realistic exhibitions of a vulgar society.

The French make a critical distinction in _ce qui remue_ from _ce qui
emeut_--that which agitates from that which touches with emotion. In the
realistic comedy it is an incessant _remuage_--no calm, merely bustling
figures, and no thought. Excepting Congreve's Way of the World, which
failed on the stage, there was nothing to keep our comedy alive on its
merits; neither, with all its realism, true portraiture, nor much
quotable fun, nor idea; neither salt nor soul.

The French have a school of stately comedy to which they can fly for
renovation whenever they have fallen away from it; and their having such
a school is mainly the reason why, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, they
know men and women more accurately than we do. Moliere followed the
Horatian precept, to observe the manners of his age and give his
characters the colour befitting them at the time. He did not paint in
raw realism. He seized his characters firmly for the central purpose of
the play, stamped them in the idea, and by slightly raising and softening
the object of study (as in the case of the ex-Huguenot, Duke de
Montausier, {3} for the study of the Misanthrope, and, according to St.
Simon, the Abbe Roquette for Tartuffe), generalized upon it so as to make
it permanently human. Concede that it is natural for human creatures to
live in society, and Alceste is an imperishable mark of one, though he is
drawn in light outline, without any forcible human colouring. Our
English school has not clearly imagined society; and of the mind hovering
above congregated men and women, it has imagined nothing. The critics
who praise it for its downrightness, and for bringing the situations home
to us, as they admiringly say, cannot but disapprove of Moliere's comedy,
which appeals to the individual mind to perceive and participate in the
social. We have splendid tragedies, we have the most beautiful of poetic
plays, and we have literary comedies passingly pleasant to read, and
occasionally to see acted. By literary comedies, I mean comedies of
classic inspiration, drawn chiefly from Menander and the Greek New Comedy
through Terence; or else comedies of the poet's personal conception, that
have had no model in life, and are humorous exaggerations, happy or
otherwise. These are the comedies of Ben Jonson, Massinger, and
Fletcher. Massinger's Justice Greedy we can all of us refer to a type,
'with fat capon lined' that has been and will be; and he would be comic,
as Panurge is comic, but only a Rabelais could set him moving with real
animation. Probably Justice Greedy would be comic to the audience of a
country booth and to some of our friends. If we have lost our youthful
relish for the presentation of characters put together to fit a type, we
find it hard to put together the mechanism of a civil smile at his
enumeration of his dishes. Something of the same is to be said of
Bobadil, swearing 'by the foot of Pharaoh'; with a reservation, for he is
made to move faster, and to act. The comic of Jonson is a scholar's
excogitation of the comic; that of Massinger a moralist's.

Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters which are saturated with the
comic spirit; with more of what we will call blood-life than is to be
found anywhere out of Shakespeare; and they are of this world, but they
are of the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination, and by great
poetic imagination. They are, as it were--I put it to suit my present
comparison--creatures of the woods and wilds, not in walled towns, not
grouped and toned to pursue a comic exhibition of the narrower world of
society. Jaques, Falstaff and his regiment, the varied troop of Clowns,
Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans and Fluellen--marvellous Welshmen!--Benedict and
Beatrice, Dogberry, and the rest, are subjects of a special study in the
poetically comic.

His Comedy of incredible imbroglio belongs to the literary section. One
may conceive that there was a natural resemblance between him and
Menander, both in the scheme and style of his lighter plays. Had
Shakespeare lived in a later and less emotional, less heroical period of
our history, he might have turned to the painting of manners as well as
humanity. Euripides would probably, in the time of Menander, when Athens
was enslaved but prosperous, have lent his hand to the composition of
romantic comedy. He certainly inspired that fine genius.

Politically it is accounted a misfortune for France that her nobles
thronged to the Court of Louis Quatorze. It was a boon to the comic
poet. He had that lively quicksilver world of the animalcule passions,
the huge pretensions, the placid absurdities, under his eyes in full
activity; vociferous quacks and snapping dupes, hypocrites, posturers,
extravagants, pedants, rose-pink ladies and mad grammarians, sonneteering
marquises, high-flying mistresses, plain-minded maids, inter-threading as
in a loom, noisy as at a fair. A simply bourgeois circle will not
furnish it, for the middle class must have the brilliant, flippant,
independent upper for a spur and a pattern; otherwise it is likely to be
inwardly dull as well as outwardly correct. Yet, though the King was
benevolent toward Moliere, it is not to the French Court that we are
indebted for his unrivalled studies of mankind in society. For the
amusement of the Court the ballets and farces were written, which are
dearer to the rabble upper, as to the rabble lower, class than
intellectual comedy. The French bourgeoisie of Paris were sufficiently
quick-witted and enlightened by education to welcome great works like Le
Tartuffe, Les Femmes Savantes, and Le Misanthrope, works that were
perilous ventures on the popular intelligence, big vessels to launch on
streams running to shallows. The Tartuffe hove into view as an enemy's
vessel; it offended, not _Dieu mais les devots_, as the Prince de Conde
explained the cabal raised against it to the King.

The Femmes Savantes is a capital instance of the uses of comedy in
teaching the world to understand what ails it. The farce of the
Precieuses ridiculed and put a stop to the monstrous romantic jargon made
popular by certain famous novels. The comedy of the Femmes Savantes
exposed the later and less apparent but more finely comic absurdity of an
excessive purism in grammar and diction, and the tendency to be idiotic
in precision. The French had felt the burden of this new nonsense; but
they had to see the comedy several times before they were consoled in
their suffering by seeing the cause of it exposed.

The Misanthrope was yet more frigidly received. Moliere thought it dead.
'I cannot improve on it, and assuredly never shall,' he said. It is one
of the French titles to honour that this quintessential comedy of the
opposition of Alceste and Celimene was ultimately understood and
applauded. In all countries the middle class presents the public which,
fighting the world, and with a good footing in the fight, knows the world
best. It may be the most selfish, but that is a question leading us into
sophistries. Cultivated men and women, who do not skim the cream of
life, and are attached to the duties, yet escape the harsher blows, make
acute and balanced observers. Moliere is their poet.

Of this class in England, a large body, neither Puritan nor Bacchanalian,
have a sentimental objection to face the study of the actual world. They
take up disdain of it, when its truths appear humiliating: when the facts
are not immediately forced on them, they take up the pride of
incredulity. They live in a hazy atmosphere that they suppose an ideal
one. Humorous writing they will endure, perhaps approve, if it mingles
with pathos to shake and elevate the feelings. They approve of Satire,
because, like the beak of the vulture, it smells of carrion, which they
are not. But of Comedy they have a shivering dread, for Comedy enfolds
them with the wretched host of the world, huddles them with us all in an
ignoble assimilation, and cannot be used by any exalted variety as a
scourge and a broom. Nay, to be an exalted variety is to come under the
calm curious eye of the Comic spirit, and be probed for what you are. Men
are seen among them, and very many cultivated women. You may distinguish
them by a favourite phrase: 'Surely we are not so bad!' and the remark:
'If that is human nature, save us from it!' as if it could be done: but
in the peculiar Paradise of the wilful people who will not see, the
exclamation assumes the saving grace.

Yet should you ask them whether they dislike sound sense, they vow they
do not. And question cultivated women whether it pleases them to be
shown moving on an intellectual level with men, they will answer that it
does; numbers of them claim the situation. Now, Comedy is the fountain
of sound sense; not the less perfectly sound on account of the sparkle:
and Comedy lifts women to a station offering them free play for their
wit, as they usually show it, when they have it, on the side of sound
sense. The higher the Comedy, the more prominent the part they enjoy in
it. Dorine in the Tartuffe is common-sense incarnate, though palpably a
waiting-maid. Celimene is undisputed mistress of the same attribute in
the Misanthrope; wiser as a woman than Alceste as man. In Congreve's Way
of the World, Millamant overshadows Mirabel, the sprightliest male figure
of English comedy.

But those two ravishing women, so copious and so choice of speech, who
fence with men and pass their guard, are heartless! Is it not preferable
to be the pretty idiot, the passive beauty, the adorable bundle of
caprices, very feminine, very sympathetic, of romantic and sentimental
fiction? Our women are taught to think so. The Agnes of the Ecole des
Femmes should be a lesson for men. The heroines of Comedy are like women
of the world, not necessarily heartless from being clear-sighted: they
seem so to the sentimentally-reared only for the reason that they use
their wits, and are not wandering vessels crying for a captain or a
pilot. Comedy is an exhibition of their battle with men, and that of men
with them: and as the two, however divergent, both look on one object,
namely, Life, the gradual similarity of their impressions must bring them
to some resemblance. The Comic poet dares to show us men and women
coming to this mutual likeness; he is for saying that when they draw
together in social life their minds grow liker; just as the philosopher
discerns the similarity of boy and girl, until the girl is marched away
to the nursery. Philosopher and Comic poet are of a cousinship in the
eye they cast on life: and they are equally unpopular with our wilful
English of the hazy region and the ideal that is not to be disturbed.

Thus, for want of instruction in the Comic idea, we lose a large audience
among our cultivated middle class that we should expect to support
Comedy. The sentimentalist is as averse as the Puritan and as the
Bacchanalian.

Our traditions are unfortunate. The public taste is with the idle
laughers, and still inclines to follow them. It may be shown by an
analysis of Wycherley's Plain Dealer, a coarse prose adaption of the
Misanthrope, stuffed with lumps of realism in a vulgarized theme to hit
the mark of English appetite, that we have in it the keynote of the
Comedy of our stage. It is Moliere travestied, with the hoof to his foot
and hair on the pointed tip of his ear. And how difficult it is for
writers to disentangle themselves from bad traditions is noticeable when
we find Goldsmith, who had grave command of the Comic in narrative,
producing an elegant farce for a Comedy; and Fielding, who was a master
of the Comic both in narrative and in dialogue, not even approaching to
the presentable in farce.

These bad traditions of Comedy affect us not only on the stage, but in
our literature, and may be tracked into our social life. They are the
ground of the heavy moralizings by which we are outwearied, about Life as
a Comedy, and Comedy as a jade, {4} when popular writers, conscious of
fatigue in creativeness, desire to be cogent in a modish cynicism:
perversions of the idea of life, and of the proper esteem for the society
we have wrested from brutishness, and would carry higher. Stock images
of this description are accepted by the timid and the sensitive, as well
as by the saturnine, quite seriously; for not many look abroad with their
own eyes, fewer still have the habit of thinking for themselves. Life,
we know too well, is not a Comedy, but something strangely mixed; nor is
Comedy a vile mask. The corrupted importation from France was noxious; a
noble entertainment spoilt to suit the wretched taste of a villanous age;
and the later imitations of it, partly drained of its poison and made
decorous, became tiresome, notwithstanding their fun, in the perpetual
recurring of the same situations, owing to the absence of original study
and vigour of conception. Scene v. Act 2 of the Misanthrope, owing, no
doubt, to the fact of our not producing matter for original study, is
repeated in succession by Wycherley, Congreve, and Sheridan, and as it is
at second hand, we have it done cynically--or such is the tone; in the
manner of 'below stairs.' Comedy thus treated may be accepted as a
version of the ordinary worldly understanding of our social life; at
least, in accord with the current dicta concerning it. The epigrams can
be made; but it is uninstructive, rather tending to do disservice. Comedy
justly treated, as you find it in Moliere, whom we so clownishly
mishandled, the Comedy of Moliere throws no infamous reflection upon
life. It is deeply conceived, in the first place, and therefore it
cannot be impure. Meditate on that statement. Never did man wield so
shrieking a scourge upon vice, but his consummate self-mastery is not
shaken while administering it. Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are made
each to whip himself and his class, the false pietists, and the insanely
covetous. Moliere has only set them in motion. He strips Folly to the
skin, displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer her
better clothing, with the lesson Chrysale reads to Philaminte and Belise.
He conceives purely, and he writes purely, in the simplest language, the
simplest of French verse. The source of his wit is clear reason: it is a
fountain of that soil; and it springs to vindicate reason, common-sense,
rightness and justice; for no vain purpose ever. The wit is of such
pervading spirit that it inspires a pun with meaning and interest. {5}
His moral does not hang like a tail, or preach from one character
incessantly cocking an eye at the audience, as in recent realistic French
Plays: but is in the heart of his work, throbbing with every pulsation of
an organic structure. If Life is likened to the comedy of Moliere, there
is no scandal in the comparison.